Family-arity

The weather in Morris is strangely sort of starting to parallel the weather in Munich, or at least it has been for the past two days. I suppose they're on pretty much the same latitude, but I'm surprised by how similar life seems here.

In both nations, I bike to the grocery store, angry and hungry. I emerge with the ingredients for pasta sauce (protein-enriched noodles, chickpeas, red sauce, spinach, mushroom, onion... always too many, because I am hungry). Somehow, in the 15 minutes I have been inside, a cloud will have crackled into existence over the store; inevitably it will be pouring rain. And since I am similar in both countries, I gnash my teeth angrily for four minutes, then decide to suck it up. I step onto my wet bike, wince as I pedal through the freezing stinging drops, return home, dump my bike wherever I usually do... and the rain stops.

The only difference is that in Morris nobody's there biking and gnashing and shopping with me. (Also, I can't buy wine in the grocery store, but that's probably a good thing.)

Basically: it's not weird to be back. I think it's just that Morris never changes, not really. I mean, we have a new building on campus, but it's not like I spend very much time in it. The generation ahead of me is gone, but it's not like I didn't expect that or mourn it when it happened. Michelle's a resident advisor in Indy Hall, not in the apartments, and Lauren's not a CA at all but rather my housemate who spends her time washing dishes and playing guitar and mothering us and reveling in NOT being a CA... but really this is all I can think of.

I still have a horse, at least for a little while. Classes are still an odd mixture of fascinating and boring and challenging and easy.

I still live in a place with people whose movements and habits interest me and frustrate me and make me happy. Last night we all drank wine at our sister house across town and then headed home, and then two of them picked up guitars, and Lauren played "Aeroplane over the Sea" without me asking her to, and Alek played "King of Carrot Flowers" really competently for the amount of wine he'd had, and Will flounced around making macaroni and cheese, and I sang, sort of, and laughed. It pleases me to no end that this kind of night is typical.

It's nice that my last semester at Morris is this stereotype. Like someone carbon-copied the best parts of everything (except the rain) and laid them all together in a line -- three months of this coming one after the other and then ending in December.

Because then I will step into an aeroplane and transform experience into memory once again. I will fly over the sea into a very similar grocery store and very similar rain, and I will have someone so wonderful and so familiar waiting there to bike home with me.

And we play Neutral Milk Hotel, too. Possibly at least as competently, and maybe as drunk.